CANAL/LS Sintesi della relazione

Research was carried out in order to develop a multilingual natural language access system to library catalogues, enabling users to enter queries in different European languages (initially German, English, French and Spanish). It will also analyse bibliographic information expressed in these languages, extracting keywords to be translated into a language selected by the user. CANAL/LS has considerably enhanced accessibility of European multilingual library catalogues, using linguistic techniques to ensure that enquiries result in all applicable responses regardless of language. It also helped set future standards for linguistic treatment of library data.

The fully integrated software package prototype is the main deliverable of the project. Publicly available are: publications on project results; a report on domain selection and user requirements; the interface definition; design and architecture report; monolingual and bilingual dictionary report; an evaluation of the prototype; final report.